The robotic dog races forwards, metallic jaws stretched wide, sharp teeth glinting in the fluorescent light. Then it turns into a balloon.

Although this sounds like a magic trick, or a scene from a strange nightmare, it is actually a sequence from Awakening, a video game that can be controlled with your mind.

Instead of holding a controller and pressing buttons to manipulate objects and move around in the game, players sit in a chair with a virtual-reality headset strapped on, and nothing in their hands. This might sound like a gimmick but this kind of technology could change the way we interact with the world, as Ramses Alcaide explained in a talk at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas in March.

Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist and the chief executive of Neurable, demonstrated the technology to an excited audience as his head of marketing Adam Molnar played the game. The driving force behind Neurable is what entrepreneur Elon Musk calls the human body’s “bandwidth problem”.